Abstract

Scholars of history, literature, religion, and the social sciences have examined the ways in which black women's cultural productions and social activism have helped shaped American culture. A philosophical analysis of black women's writings, however, remains a largely unexplored field of research. To my knowledge, we have not engaged a corpus of texts of a black woman novelist as an oeuvre of critical reflection that contributes knowledge to varying traditions of thought. Underlying black women's social activism are carefully reasoned perspectives on questions of the human condition that inform their literary strategies and visions. Black women encode these perspectives as philosophical projects in their writings by drawing on and reworking philosophical systems through their multi-layered experiences of oppression and visions of social change. Their work offers insights into fundamental questions of knowledge, history, culture, and social development. ;This dissertation treats the early writings of Alice Walker as a corpus of developing critical thought on problems of revolutionary struggle, critical method, human being, social totality, and power. I also discuss her contributions to Marxian social theory. To achieve these objectives, I draw on scholarship and methodological inputs from philosophy, literary criticism, history, and theology/ethics